Civilized Women

Wren read the message twice before she trusted herself to speak. Then she turned the phone so Sebastian could see it, because whatever fragile alliance they'd struck in that elevator, she needed him to understand exactly what they were flying toward.

He read it once. His face didn't change, but the muscle in his jaw went hard enough that she could see it from across the cabin.

"She's never been subtle," he said quietly. "But she's never been this fast, either. Two hours ago she had a suspicion. Now she has your address."

"She's had my address for longer than two hours." Wren's hands had gone cold again, the way they had in the clinic, and she hated her own body a little for betraying her like this, for not staying steady when steady was the only thing that had kept her safe for five years. "She had a photograph from a park last month, Sebastian. That's not something you assemble in an afternoon. That's surveillance with a budget and a timeline. How long has she known I was in Lisbon?"

"I don't know." He said it plainly, without the smoothing-over she remembered from their marriage, the way he used to soften bad news until it barely registered as bad. That, at least, had changed. "I intend to find out before we land. But I need you to understand something about my mother before you walk into that flat."

"I understand plenty about your mother."

"You understand the version of her that runs board meetings and vets marriage contracts like she's underwriting insurance policies." His voice had dropped, low and urgent, the private register he used to use in the back of town cars when he didn't want a driver hearing family business. "You don't understand the version of her that decided, eleven years ago, that the Castellano bloodline was the only thing standing between our family and irrelevance, after my father lost half the shipping fleet to a bad merger and the board nearly voted him out. She has spent a decade making sure nothing threatens that line again. Not board members. Not rivals. Not me. She will not see Theo as a child, Wren. She will see him as the asset she was promised five years ago and never received."

"He's not an asset."

"I know that." Something in his voice cracked, just slightly, just enough that Wren looked up from her phone and actually saw him, really saw him, for the first time since he'd walked into her consultation room. "I have known that since the moment I saw that photograph of you outside the clinic in Lisbon. I have a son I've never met, and my mother found out about him before I could, and I am telling you exactly how dangerous she is because I need you to walk into that flat prepared for her, not surprised by her. I am not on her side, Wren. I have never been less on her side than I am right now."

Wren studied him for a long moment, the plane humming quietly around them, the lights of the Atlantic coast starting to glimmer through the window as they began their descent. She wanted to believe him. That was the most dangerous part of all of this, more dangerous than Delia waiting in her flat, more dangerous than the surveillance photos, the fact that some old, stubborn, foolish part of her still wanted to believe Sebastian Castellano when he looked at her like that.

She'd believed him once before. It had cost her everything.

"When we land," she said instead of answering him, "you let me go in first. Alone."

"Absolutely not."

"Sebastian." She said his name the way she used to say it when she needed him to actually hear her instead of already composing his rebuttal. "Your mother wants to negotiate with me like this is a business acquisition. If you walk in beside me, she gets to control the dynamic, husband and wife reunited, one united front for her to work against. If I walk in alone, she has to negotiate with a woman who owes the Castellano family nothing. That's the only leverage I have left. Don't take it from me before I've even used it."

He didn't answer right away. She watched him war with it, watched the instinct to protect, to control, to fix, run up against the plain logic of what she'd said. Five years ago he would have overridden her without a second thought, certain his judgment outweighed hers simply by virtue of having more resources to throw at a problem.

"Fine," he said finally, and it cost him visibly to say it. "I'll be outside. Not far. If you need me—"

"I won't."

"If you need me," he said again, firmer, "you call, and I am through that door in under a minute, whatever my mother wants to say about it."

The plane touched down twenty minutes later. Wren's driver, a wiry man named Tomas who'd ferried her and Theo around Lisbon for three years without ever asking a question she didn't want answered, was waiting at the base of the stairs with the car running. Sebastian's car idled a discreet distance behind it, and she felt his eyes on her back the entire walk across the tarmac, though she didn't turn around to confirm it.

Her flat was on the third floor of a converted townhouse near the river, chosen specifically because it had one entrance, one exit, and neighbors who minded their own business. She'd never once imagined she'd be walking up to that door bracing for a Castellano to be waiting on the other side of it.

The door was unlocked when she reached it. She always locked it. Always.

Wren's pulse spiked as she pushed it open, every instinct honed by five years of careful hiding screaming at her to turn around, to call Sebastian, to not walk into a room she hadn't secured herself.

She walked in anyway.

Delia Castellano was sitting in Wren's own armchair, back straight, ankles crossed, exactly as composed as she'd been the day she handed Wren a monogrammed contract disguised as a wedding gift five years ago. On the side table beside her sat a framed photograph Wren had never seen before, a photograph that hadn't come from Delia's surveillance file.

A photograph of Theo, laughing, front tooth missing, taken from inside the flat.

Taken, Wren realized with a cold drop of horror, from somewhere in this very room.

"Hello, Wren." Delia's smile didn't reach her eyes. "I let myself get comfortable. I hope you don't mind. Your son has excellent taste in stuffed animals, by the way. The little elephant is on his bed. Theodore, is it? Though I understand you call him Theo."

Wren's blood ran to ice.

"Where is he," she said, her voice barely above a whisper, already turning toward the hallway, toward his bedroom, toward the empty silence of the flat that should have had a babysitter and a four-year-old in it and instead had nothing but Delia Castellano's satisfied smile and a photograph that proved she'd already been inside his room.

"Don't panic," Delia said pleasantly, not moving from the chair. "He's perfectly safe. He's with my driver, having ice cream, probably ruining his dinner as we speak. I thought it would be easier for us to talk without a four-year-old interrupting."

The world tilted sideways.

"You took him."

"I borrowed him," Delia corrected, calm as still water, "for exactly as long as it takes the two of us to come to an understanding about his future. Sit down, Wren. We have a great deal to discuss, and I'd rather not do it with you standing over me like I'm the one who did something wrong here.”